Жизнь, технология, и прочие хорошие дела
The project that we have been working on for the past 4 months is finally seeing the light of day: yesterday I merged the Unicode support into the public PHP tree. I was going to say that my part of the hard work is done, but I guess I still have to edu-ma-cate developers about Unicode and other finer things in life. 🙂
PHP is 10 years old. It’s a big kid now, and it’s been a large part of my professional life ever since December of 1998 when I submitted bug #870 asking for a new language construct and then offered to help make PHP run better on Windows. Many words have been and will be written about this anniversary, but I would simply like to thank Rasmus for his friendship and for creating and nurturing PHP, and also his wife Christine for supporting Rasmus’ efforts throughout the years. May the next decade be ever more fun.
Posting this out-of-order, but it couldn’t be helped.
A week before Cancún, I was at the International PHP Conference 2005 Spring Edition, held in Amsterdam. I gave an inaugural talk on the new Unicode support in PHP and also on the current state and development of PHP-GTK 2. This was my first visit to this city and I was determined enjoy it, despite the yawn-inducing 6 am departure time out of San Francisco and the three hours of turbulence after take-off. The good thing was that on the flight to Dulles airport the person seated next to me turned out to be the head of software department for Affymetrix, and we spent the whole time talking about DNA micro array, exons, TOUFs (transcripts of unknown function), and other such topics.
Continue reading “Amsterdam” »
Hard to believe it’s been over three years since I first released PHP-GTK. A community has grown around this tool, but in the last year or so I really did not pay it much attention until I read a big thread on the php-gtk-general list called “what is going on with gtk.php.net?”. And when I read it, I felt ashamed. Here were people who have come to depend on this tool, who are trying to contribute to the best of their abilities and time constraints, and who are frustrated by the incomplete documentation and lack of updates to the website, and I was absent from my duty.
Yes, when you release a piece of software into the wild, wild world, you have certain obligations and duties as the author or the primary maintainer. There is plenty of abandonware in the world already, and adding one more corpse to the pile does not help anybody. Software is only good if there is someone behind it, whether it’s a single person, a group, or a whole company. So I wrote a Letter to Community, apologized for my prolonged absence, and tried to kickstart the project again. And it worked! People came to my call for help, and now the website is getting updates, the documentation is getting new content, and I have gotten back to my responsibilities of developing code and overseeing the project at large. PHP-GTK 2 is on the horizon, boys and girls, and that’s all I’ll say for now.
This morning at work I found a package sitting in my mailbox. From Brazil. I tore off the wrapping and found inside a copy of the very first book about PHP-GTK! Pablo Dall’Oglio, a long time user and a friend, has written PHP-GTK: Criando Aplicações Gráficas com PHP to impart his experience and educate people about this software library that I developed. Rasmus still calls PHP-GTK “bogus”, but I think it’s just been validated a bit more. And PHP had been called “bogus” when it started too, I think.. 🙂
Feels good to be on solid ground again. Back from my trip to Florida and the Bahamas on the inaugural PHP Cruise.
The PHP Cruise started on March 1, but I flew in a bit earlier because I wanted to visit the Kennedy Space Center. Pictures are here.
The cruise was an unequivocal success, with about 90 attendees and 12 speakers. It was a bit unusual to have a conference afloat and the first time wrinkles made themselves known, but Marco Tabini and Arbi Arzoumani quickly ironed them out. The quality of the talks was pretty high, better than at some other conferences of the same size that I attended. I ended up taking two slots to give my presentation on regular expressions because it was so extensive.
It was my first time on a cruise ship so I have no real basis of comparison, but on the whole I enjoyed it. Onboard restaurants, casino, bars, nightlife, comedy, and of course new people. All of us at the conference had a great time it seemed and the weather was nice and sunny. At Nassau I tried out scuba diving and it was simply fantastic – I’ll have to get certified now. The pictures from the cruise are here.
Word of advice: if you can, use your miles for upgrades to upper class, rather than for tickets themselves. The flight back was much, much better that way.
I’m off to embark on the PHP Cruise where I’ll be giving a talk about regular expressions in PHP. Back in a week.
Ryan Norris has written up a good article on the benefits of tiered application development in PHP. As he correctly points out, there is a difference between keeping your logic and presentation completely separate and dividing it along the more appropriate line of business logic vs. presentation and its related logic. I have long been an advocate of this latter approach and a lot of it is reflected in Smarty, at least when I used to work on it. If you developing a PHP application consisting of more than a couple of pages, it would probably be a good idea to read this article and apply it to your project.
I didn’t know that I was a drug dealer. And what brought me to that page? This.
Getting to New York for PHP Con was easy, getting back though was miserable. I had to drive from New Haven to Boston in a dreary, disgusting, all-obscuring rain that continued all day. Probably one of the worst drives of my life. But the conference itself proved to be good.
Some recommendations for places I visited this time:
Bizarre person of the month: a long-haired blond man wearing nothing but tight underwear and cowboy boots and hat, all white, strumming the guitar in the middle of Times Square and singing “I’m a little blonde girl…”
